Why you should know:
Arsenic is a carcinogen and has various other negative health effects; enough to warrant exposure limits in various jurisdictions. A five minute boil-and-discard step before cooking is a simple way to reduce your exposure, especially if you eat a lot of rice.
Details are in the study, linked in the title of this post. Here’s a diagram from the abstract:
Oh boy, someone better go back and tell all of Asia for the last 10,000 years
Neither the rice species nor the way it is prepared is the same as it was 10000 years ago. India has been producing spices for millenia but the massive amounts of arsenic, cadmium, and lead found in spices sold on the Indian market (and sometimes in Indian exports) is still a recent development.
The world is moving towards a focus on mass production through industrialisation on a record scale. This has an impact on things like the natural water sources, which is where most arsenic in rice is coming from.
Europe has limits on the amount of arsenic in rice, but I’ve never seen a lack of rice varieties in my supermarkets. You can have rice without huge amounts of arsenic, that’s not a weird thing to ask for.
This is a growing problem due to climate change (higher temperatures seem to increase arsenic uptake) and pollutants, so this doesn’t make any sense.